Technical Field
The present invention relates to an information processing device, an image processing apparatus, and an information processing method.
Description of the Related Art
As a type of information processing device, a so-called page printer executes information processing based on a page description language (PDL). The page printer analyzes the PDL to generate rendering commands corresponding to an intermediate language, and executes information processing of generating print data based on the rendering commands. Specifically, the page printer renders multi-valued band images in a memory based on the rendering commands, performs a color conversion process, a gradation process, and an encoding process on the multi-valued band images, stores one page of encoded data of the multi-valued band images, and decodes and outputs the stored data.
In recent years, a function of handling translucent images has been added to some of PDLs, such as extensible markup language (XML) paper specification (XPS) and portable document format (PDF).
Further, PDF specifies “page group” processing in the specifications of PDF version 1.7. The page group processing of PDF is a type of image processing performed on pixel data of multi-valued band images. To handle translucent images in the page group processing, a translucency calculation process is repeatedly executed with the multi-valued band images stored in the memory and a parameter (i.e., a translucency value) for the translucency calculation process. The translucency calculation process is performed on each of pixels of the pixel data of the multi-valued band images. Therefore, data for translucent image processing (i.e., the translucency value) continues to be updated and held until the translucency calculation process is completed. During this translucency calculation process, a storage device (i.e., a main memory) is frequently accessed, and a large amount of data is transferred to and from the storage device.
To increase the speed of the rendering process and the translucent image processing described above, an image processing apparatus may use hardware to execute the rendering process and the translucent image processing to render a translucent image and a color image separately.
Further, to address information processing that increases the amount of data transferred to and from the storage device, a processor may be configured to reduce the amount of calculation processing related to image synthesis, such as a watermark synthesis process.